Caffeine: A vitamin-like nutrient or adaptogen

February 28, 2011 by East West Healing

Questions about tea and coffee, cancer and other degenerative diseases, and the hormones.

There is a popular health-culture that circulates mistaken ideas about nutrition, and coffee drinking has been a perennial target of this culture. It is commonly said that coffee is a drug, not a food, and that its drug action is harmful, and that this harm is not compensated by any nutritional benefit. Most physicians subscribe to most of these “common sense” ideas about coffee, and form an authoritative barrier against the assimilation of scientific information about coffee.

I think it would be good to reconsider coffee’s place in the diet and in health care.

Coffee drinkers have a lower incidence of thyroid disease, including cancer, than non-drinkers.

Caffeine protects the liver from alcohol and acetaminophen (Tylenol) and other toxins, and coffee drinkers are less likely than people who don’t use coffee to have elevated serum enzymes and other indications of liver damage.

One definition of a vitamin is that it is an organic chemical found in foods, the lack of which causes a specific disease, or group of diseases. A variety of substances that have been proposed to be vitamins haven’t been recognized as being essential, and some substances that aren’t essential are sometimes called vitamins. Sometimes these issues haven’t had enough scientific investigation, but often nonscientific forces regulate nutritional ideas.

The definition of “a disease” isn’t as clear as text-book writers have implied, and “causality” in biology is always more complex than we like to believe.

Nutrition is one of the most important sciences, and should certainly be as prestigious and well financed as astrophysics and nuclear physics, but while people say “it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out,” no one says “it doesn’t take a nutritionist to understand that.” Partly, that’s because medicine treated scientific nutrition as an illegitimate step-child, and refused throughout the 20th century to recognize that it is a central part of scientific health care. In the 1970s, physicians and dietitians were still ridiculing the idea that vitamin E could prevent or cure diseases of the circulatory system, and babies as well as older people were given “total intravenous nutrition” which lacked nutrients that are essential to life, growth, immunity, and healing. Medicine and science are powerfully institutionalized, but no institution or profession has existed for the purpose of encouraging people to act reasonably.

Share Your Thoughts

Hi, I realize that as a nutrient, coffee has so many benefits. Yet, when I drink it, I get extreme heart palpitations. So severe that in college when I did not know any better, I ended up in the emergency room. Since then I have avoided it, until last year when I tried decaf. Once again, I got extremely palpitations. I am not so sensitive to tea, but I still have to be very carefully. That being said, I can not give caffeine such a unilateral endorsement. I am under the impression, that many other people are in the same boat as myself. Any clues as how to release my hearts tendency to palpate?

Thanks!

April 14, 2012 • 4:37 pm •

Garrett

Can you state the sources of these studies please because i have always heard that caffeine stripes the bones of calcium, throws off the circadian rhythm, produced 3 types of carcinogens and ect.

April 19, 2012 • 3:16 pm •

CatherineB

I am a lover of the idea that coffee does all of the above for us however I am also trying to understand all the research that says coffee isn’t good. I can personally attest to the fact that it makes my brain sharper, gives me a competitive advantage when training and speeds up my digestion, however I am still afraid that over time I am just going to burn out my adrenal glands and also over time it has less and less of an effect. Would it make more sense to get the body balanced and rely on natural energy production to have a sharper brain, be a better athlete and have my digestion working optimally? If I can do without coffee would that be better for me? Or is it such a protective nutrient I am better off having it as a staple in my diet? Thoughts anyone???